Tuesday, 31 March 2015

This is another one for the aspiring Games Masters out
there. Remember a while back, when I said that scenario design will become a big part of your life? Let’s talk a little more
about that, and about the three act structure, a literary device that, used
properly, will save your butt.

The three act structure is sometimes defined as the Setup,
Confrontation, and the Resolution. John Yorke calls each of these acts “a unit of action bound by a
character’s desire,” and in this case these are your player’s characters. They
drive the story forward with their own actions and desires; you provide the
structure, in which their actions are played out.

Each act has its own beginning, middle and end, which means
that, for instance, the Setup has its own internal three act structure going
on. In each unit of action that makes up the act as a whole, the characters follow
their own desires and goals, which move the plot forward. At the end of the
Setup there will be a turning point which leads naturally into the
Confrontation, and once the Confrontation reaches its conclusion, there will be
another turning point that leads naturally to the Resolution. Beginning,
middle, end.

The point to take away is this: when designing scenarios, if
you bear the three act structure in mind and write accordingly, it will lend
your ongoing narrative coherency and drama. It will order your thoughts, and
let you plot your boss encounters accordingly; it will show you where the best
place is to leave clues as to what’s going on, when it’s a good idea to
introduce significant antagonists, and where it’s time to introduce dilemmas.

With that in mind, I’m going to discuss a basic fantasy
scenario, in terms of the three act structure.

Starting with the Setup: the characters are in a trading
town looking for adventure and loot. They’ve been chasing up rumors of a
dungeon somewhere nearby, and discover that, according to legend, a robber
baron who was killed many years ago left a castle behind somewhere out in the
King’s Woods, near the Old Road. That discovery is the first unit of action in
the Setup.

The second unit of action comes when the characters try to
find out more about this castle, and the dungeon that allegedly exists below
it.They discover that, according to
local traders, the King’s Woods have become very dangerous within the last four
months. Caravans have been attacked, people carried off, and nobody knows why;
the caravans are never looted, so whoever’s doing it isn’t after money. The
attackers seem interested only in captives, but they never send a ransom
demand, and they don’t abduct everyone they meet, just a few people. This would
be a good time to insert a few clues, which will pay off later. In this
instance, the clues could be something like: your wizard or your cleric, being
knowledgeable fellows, can work out that each of the abducted people were born
in a very lucky year. Evil sorcerous types sometimes use people born in a lucky
year for human sacrifices, and it’s said that dragons find them extra crunchy.
So maybe not so lucky after all …

The third unit of action in the Setup comes when the
characters go into the woods for the first time, and have their first minor
boss encounter. Skeletons and other undead horrors rise up and attack them,
and, if they happen to be with a caravan – maybe hired as guards? – the undead
try to abduct anyone born in a lucky year. They seem to be directed by a
special undead, stronger and better armed than the rest, who apparently can
tell which humans are born in lucky years. Each of the undead wears the rotted
livery of the robber baron. The special undead carries a magic item which
allows it to pick out lucky year targets. None of them are intelligent, which
means someone else is running the show.

This third unit of the Setup is sometimes called the
Inciting Incident: this is the moment where, the background of events having
been established, the characters are given the first real hint that all is not
as simple as it seems. After all, the special undead couldn’t have made that
magic item, so who gave it to him, why, and can that person’s plan be stopped?
This is the question that will be answered in the third act, the Resolution.

That’s the Setup sorted out. The characters came in driven
by their desire for adventure and loot, and now they have a mystery to solve.
All roads lead to that robber baron’s castle. Hopefully the captives are still
alive!

So now we move on to the Confrontation. That’s going to take
place at the robber baron’s castle, abandoned for many decades. Perhaps, in the
first unit, the characters try to find out more about the robber baron, or they
try to scout out the castle before attacking it. This is another good place to
start dropping some clues, which will pay off later. If they try to find out
more about the baron, they learn he was a particularly vicious warrior, whose
acts were so vile that the townsfolk, led by some heroes, stormed his castle
and destroyed it. He tried to escape, via a secret passage, into the woods, but
was caught and killed. If they scout the castle, they see that it was sacked
and burned many years ago, but recent tracks indicate that creatures, most of
them undead, have been coming and going here for the last few months.

In the second unit, the characters go into the castle and
start clearing out the undead, of which there are quite a bunch. Led by a black
knight dressed in the baron’s armor, these creatures pose a significant threat,
and the dungeon beneath the castle is inhabited by other powerful creatures.
Yet when all the fighting’s over, and the loot tallied up, the characters are
left with a quandary. None of the captives are here, nor does it seem as if
they ever were here. Moreover none of the creatures the characters have faced
so far, even the knight, are intelligent. They couldn’t have come up with this
scheme. So who did?

In the third unit of the Confrontation, the characters
discover signs that lead to the real culprit. That secret passage mentioned in
the first unit has to lead into the dungeon, and it has to exit in the forest
somewhere. Perhaps they should search for it, either in the dungeon or in the
woods, where the exit ought to be. Or maybe they just search the dungeon really
thoroughly, looking for the captives, and find it that way. One of the heroes
from that long-ago first raid may even have left a clue of some kind, but
however it’s done, the third unit of the Confrontation must lead to the first
unit of the Resolution, which is in that secret passage.

Now we’re coming to the meat of the matter. The first unit
of the Resolution sees the characters discover that secret passage, which the
real villain of the piece has been using as a hiding place. That villain is a
necromancer, with a few tough hirelings and sorcerous apprentices, as well as
some more undead. This necromancer – perhaps he’s a descendant of the baron out
for revenge, or maybe he’s just using the baron’s castle as a convenient base -
has been capturing those born in a lucky year for sacrifice, in a ritual which
the necromancer hopes to use to build a particularly powerful magic item.

From this point forward it’s going to be a series of action
scenes. The first unit has the characters facing off against the necromancer’s
least powerful hirelings and apprentices in the secret tunnel. This allows them
to rescue some of the captives, who can tell them about the necromancer’s
ritual site deep in the forest. The necromancer has gone there, trying to
complete his ritual with the remaining captives before the characters can catch
up.

The second unit has the characters in a race against time,
tracking the necromancer to that ritual site. They’ll encounter some tough
resistance along the way, including the necromancer’s remaining hirelings and
apprentices. All of which leads to the final unit of the Resolution, at the
ritual site.The necromancer’s
conducting the ritual there, with a few undead or summoned entities as
bodyguards. Now the true enemy has been revealed, the stage set, the final boss
encounter primed and ready to go. Whether or not the characters prevail, or end
up with the other captives, sacrificed so the necromancer can gain more power,
is up to them.

Setup, Confrontation, Resolution. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
But within that three act structure is the building blocks, the units of
action, for any scenario you care to design, and if you’re the Game Master,
scenario design is going to become a major part of your life. That’s why people
show up every week or so and buy you pizza; they expect entertainment, high
adventure, a few laughs, and loot. Don’t panic. Scenario design isn’t that
hard. But if you need a helping hand, bear in mind these three acts, and write
accordingly.

Monday, 30 March 2015

“So I won’t get away with it, huh? How many times I’ve heard
that from dumb coppers, I couldn’t count … You’d give your left eye to nail me,
wouldn’t you?” Johnny Rocco, Key Largo

Let’s talk about bad guys.

If you’re the Keeper, Dungeon Master or whatever other hat
of doom you’re wearing this week, you already know the problem: sometimes
villains just leap off the page, screaming for attention as they blow up the
world, but more often they just sit there, spineless slugs waiting for death.
What went wrong, and how can you design a tabletop RPG villain that really
catches the players’ attention?

The problem with villains is, too often they exist only to
do one thing: be foiled by the player characters. Villains are punching bags,
paper Nazis, colorful targets that sit on the far end of the shooting range and
never shoot back, or at least not accurately. There’s nothing unique about
them, nothing that makes the players think ‘I want to know more about this
guy.’ If the players don’t feel engaged by the villain, they won’t respect him,
and at that point the whole thing falls flat.

There’s a useful writing exercise for creating characters in
fiction, which applies just as much to roleplay as it does that unpublished
novel lurking on your hard drive. When designing a villain, think about the
answers to the following questions:

What is the villain’s name, age, ethnicity and
gender?

Name three physical attributes.

List three favorite items.

Where does the villain live?

How does the villain make money?

Where is the villain right now? What is he doing
or saying?

What is a problem the villain faces?

What is a secret the villain hopes nobody finds
out about?

What is the villain’s core belief?

What does the villain want, long term?

The first five questions on that list are self-explanatory.
You need to know who the villain is and what they look like, or have on them at
all times. You also need to know how much cash or capital they have, so you can
work out what the villain has available to throw at the player characters. The
rest of it wants a little explanation.

A villain is a character, with wishes, dreams and plans,
just like everyone else in the game world. He didn’t just wake up one morning
and decide, ‘I want to rob a bank today.’ The whole idea of robbing banks, or
whatever it is the villain does, springs out of his desire to satisfy his long
term goals. Maybe he wants to buy a house so he and his young wife and child
can settle down, but he can’t afford it. Maybe he knows it’s a mob bank, and he
wants to bring down the mob, so he figures hitting that particular bank is a
virtuous act. Maybe it’s something else, but whatever it is, it’s tied to his
core beliefs, and has the potential to satisfy his long-term wants.

This influences everything the villain says and does, and he
should take no action that fails to satisfy his wants. If he’s doing something,
anything, it’s because the thing that he’s doing is important to him in some
way: it protects a secret he doesn’t want anyone to know about, it solves a
problem for him, it fits in with his core beliefs, or pushes forward a
long-term goal. If it doesn’t do any of these things, then why would he bother?

The bit about where the villain is and what he’s doing or
saying is for your benefit. You need to be able to picture, in your head, what
this villain is likely to do or say in any given situation, and often this
means coming up with something on the fly. It really helps if you’ve worked out
beforehand the kind of thing he’s likely to say in a particular situation,
because you can use that as a jumping-off point to work out what he’s likely to
say in other settings.

So how does this work in practice?

I’m going to use an example villain from a Bookhounds of
London campaign for Trail of Cthulhu. You don’t need to know the ruleset to
understand the villain; for the purpose of this example, all you need to know
is that Bookhounds is a horror game set in London, England, during the 1930s,
and the core idea of the campaign is that the characters are booksellers
dealing in occult tomes. That means the villain has to be interested in buying
or collecting occult grimoires, for whatever reason.

Stanley David Fentiman. Caucasian Male, in his
early 30s.

Tall. Wears good quality clothes that have seen
hard use. Is missing two fingers on his left hand.

He always has a catalogue on him for a
forthcoming book auction. Trench art RFC swagger stick. Webley Mk IV revolver,
RFC issue.

Already you can see a bit of his history in what he wears
and owns. He’s been injured at some point in the past; that suggests a
catastrophic accident, or some kind of fight. The Great War isn’t that far off,
and if he’s in his 30s now he could easily have been old enough to have served.
The two RFC items indicate he was in the Royal Flying Corps, which means he can
fly, and since one of the items is trench art, Fentiman’s probably quite
talented as an artist. His clothes have seen hard use, which suggests he hasn’t
the money to replace them when they get torn or worn out.

Oxford, and is also a member of two London
clubs, which is where he stays when he’s in the city.

Private tutor, formerly an Oxford don, disgraced
and thrown out of his college.

He’s a very educated man, who formerly held a good position
but now does not. That explains the good clothes, and why he can’t afford to
replace them. He may also find it difficult to afford his club dues each year,
but someone of his social status would probably hang onto those club
memberships even if it means he has to eat beans for a month or two.

Fentiman is confronting his enemies just before
a fight, either in his tattered apartments or in a school room. “Dear boy, you
ought to have a better grasp of grammar at your advanced age. Not that you will
have an opportunity to improve …” [draws Webley]

Problem: he wants to establish a Satanic school
of necromancy, but lacks the resources.

Satanic schools are a staple of folklore. Allegedly the
Scholomance high in the mountains of Romania admitted ten students, each of
whom was taught by the Devil himself. When the course of learning was complete,
one student was sacrificed to the Devil as payment and the others were allowed
to go free. Dracula himself is said to have studied there, and the Scholomance
also turns up in World of Warcraft.

Fentiman considers himself a master occultist, a true
Satanic lord, but he’s also a teacher at heart. He wants to pass on his
knowledge to future generations of occultists, but for that to happen he needs
a lot of money, and also needs to conduct several powerful magic rituals. He
may even need a school building, perhaps an old Victorian one that has fallen
into disuse which he can then convert to his own purpose.

Secret: he lost his privileges at Oxford when he
was caught helping several of his student cheat; he was using the money the
students paid him to buy occult books. He gets very angry if reminded of this
disgrace.

Secrets can be very useful to the players. They reveal
weaknesses, something that the characters can exploit to help them defeat the
villain. In this case Fentiman gets angry if reminded of his fall from grace,
and anger often makes people careless. Maybe in a critical moment the
characters could use this information to upset Fentiman, at which point he
starts making mistakes. That could be very bad for Fentiman, if he happens to
be in the middle of a ritual or summoning.

Fentiman believes he is one of the most powerful
occultists alive today, and one of the most knowledgeable.

Just because a person believes something, doesn’t make it
so. Fentiman probably has some ability – unless he’s completely delusional –
but there may be people more powerful than he, and more knowledgeable. He would
probably be very upset if something happened to contradict his core belief.

·

Fentiman wants to establish a Scholomance of his
own, to teach others.

If there is such a school, then there are students. Fentiman
probably has some picked out already, and if he ever gets this thing going then
there will be more students, eager to learn. There may be a school building,
perhaps some decayed old Dotheboys Hall, abandoned decades ago after an awful
scandal. There may be staff, but what kind of person – or creature – is
Fentiman likely to hire?

Consider this tactic, when designing your own villains. Find
out what they want, what they fear people will find out about them, what
they’re prepared to kill for. Once you know that, you know how to make your
villain memorable, and then it’s time to make the player characters shake in
their boots. There’s nothing more terrifying than a well-designed villain, out
for blood!

Monday, 23 March 2015

I no longer write for the Escapist. Until recently I had a regular column, and as I completed several pieces which now will not be published there, I thought I'd make use of the material here. Thus the first in a short series of unpublished stuff, this one about the notorious Total Party Kill.

Enjoy!

**

The Total Party Kill is the one thing players, and usually
Game Masters, want to avoid, yet it happens so often you’d think people
actually enjoyed getting fried by dragons. Usually it’s a very sudden event,
and almost completely unexpected. Someone tanks a save, or whatever it may be,
and before you know it, six stalwart heroes are being mashed into jam for the
next orcs’ tea party. What went wrong?

Dave Noonan, back in the days of 3.5 Dungeons and
Dragons, suggested that lack of communication between players is one
of the big issues. “When times get tough at the game table,’ Noonan said, “It’s easy to stay focused on your character and lose awareness
of what your comrades are doing.”

Noonan noticed that players, when faced with a significant
threat, stopped thinking like a team and started reacting like individuals. As
a team, a group might realize that a fight’s too tough, and decide to withdraw.
But each of those individuals has a character sheet, with a long list of combat
abilities and spells. It proved too tempting to study that character sheet,
looking for a way out that wasn’t there. Players would say they wanted the
group to retreat, then engage in combat themselves, or start spellcasting,
hoping for a good roll.

Funny thing: every single player I’ve ever met has worked
out, in advance, how fantastically awesome their character will be, if they
roll a critical success. That’s partly because every player thinks they’ll be
the one to roll that critical success, right when they need it the most. Just
like diehard gamblers, they think critical failure is something that happens to
other people, not to them.

In a TPK situation, the chance to retreat is usually a
fleeting thing. Before too many rounds go by, the enemy might have blocked the
escape route, or knocked out one too many important characters; the cleric,
say, with all the healing magic.Then
it’s too late. All that’s left is to order the pizza and start the post-game
argument.

On the other hand, if the players – or even just one player
– step up and devise a plan for getting the whole group out, the TPK problem
might never come up. Assign one player the task of picking up the unconscious
or critically wounded, assign a couple others the task of securing the exit,
and then tactically retrograde as fast as your feet will let you. Job done!

That’s in situations where the combat system is crunchy,
with lots of add-ons and modifiers. Call of Cthulhu used to
be famous for its TPK situations, and its mechanics about as crunch-free as can
be, while still using dice. There’s no leveling system, so the 10 to 15 hit
points you start the game with are the only ones you will ever have. There’s a
percentage chance to hit, a chance to critical succeed or fail, and a damage
roll, but the system lacks many significant combat modifiers and situational
adjustments that Dungeons and Dragons players would be
familiar with. What counts as a TPK situation in that system?

Let me just give you the brief low-down on one such
situation, from the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign. Very mild spoiler warning, but
really, we aren’t talking plot here. The situation is described as:

Present at the ritual will be twelve priests,
including [powerful and important NPC] and [equally powerful and important
NPC], nearly 800 cultists … and 100 [powerful monsters]. The rest of the
[friendly NPCs the group will have encountered previously] will be there, as
sacrifices. The din and screams will be loud and sustained. Eventually,
at the height of the ceremony, the enemy will summon up a godlike creature
capable of demolishing a city.

Now, if your first thought is, ‘Attack! ATTACK! ATTACK!’ there’s clearly a disconnect going on here. If ever
there is a moment for stealth and caution, it’s when you’re facing off against
a battalion strength group of dangerous people backed up by another small army
of monsters. Yet I have seen otherwise rational players, without any special
equipment beyond a few sticks of dynamite and a couple rifles, happily charge
in without a moment’s thought. Tell you what I rarely see: I’ve rarely seen
those same rational players get together, as a group, and plan out what the
group was going to do about the problem.

I get that everybody wants to be the hero. I really, really
do, but there is such a thing as overwhelming odds. Bilbo Baggins, when meeting
Smaug for the first time, doesn’t rush up and try to kick the old wyrm in
whatever passes for its genitals, hoping for a critical success. Maybe that’s
one of the bonus scenes on the DVD; I’m not in a hurry to watch it. In the
book, Bilbo’s more sensible than that. He hides, and schemes, and bluffs,
because he knows that, if he puts even one foot wrong, there isn’t a Reflex
save high enough to save him from becoming a charcoal briquette.

So far I’ve been talking about the player’s side of the
equation. What about that sinister fiend behind the screen? How much
responsibility does the Game Master have for the TPK?

As Wizards of the Coast designer Andy Collins once pointed out, “It's no challenge for the DM to kill off the whole
party; the challenge is in creating encounters that are just tough enough to
put a scare into the PCs without actually killing them all off.” Sometimes,
particularly for novices, finding that balance is a tricky business, and it
doesn’t help that some monsters are well over the top to begin with. However
there’s no advice anyone can give to help you there, beyond ‘be careful’;
finding that balance is a skill that only comes with time and practice.

That said, there is one way that better communication
between GM and player can help avoid a TPK. The players don’t always know when
a monster is going to test their limits, and that’s sometimes because the
description the GM’s given so far is insufficient. If the group’s about to
march into a boss encounter, the group needs to be aware of that fact, and that
means clearly signposting the threat. It might be plenty of corpses lying
around, or scorch marks where the deadly trap’s exploded several times before.
Maybe the Doppleganger’s impersonation of an ally is just a little bit off, or
that doorway just radiates evil. But there has to be that one clue, or warning
sign, that things are about to get very nasty, to put the group on alert.

This goes back to something I’ve said before: the GM should always be open in all of her dealings with
the group, because even perceived unfairness can ruin the session, if not the
campaign. This doesn’t mean the GM can’t be clever; it means the GM has to
always be seen as a fair arbiter. Therefore the group gets one warning, whether
it’s as cheesy as a talking skull on a stick, or as menacing as a fresh
bloodstain on the dungeon floor.What
the group does with that warning is out of the GM’s hands. The heroes want to
be mashed into jam? Fine. Let ‘em get squished, and maybe next time they’ll be
more careful.

This isn’t a time to get hung up on ability checks either.
Just give out the necessary information; don’t make them roll for it. A failed Spot
check might put the group on alert, but it lacks drama. Suddenly realizing that
all the birds and wildlife in the forest have gone quiet, fearful of some large
predator, is drama personified.

So next time you and your buddies are down in
the dungeon, wandering around without a care in the world, remember: you get
one warning, sunshine. Just one, and if you march headlong into trouble
regardless, you’d better be ready, and willing, to run. None of this hero
nonsense. The orcs already have a jar picked out, just for you!